It's been less than 2 years since the Zen4CPU architecture was launched, but no one is waiting for progress.Today, at the Computex2024 event, AMD announced the new Zen5 design. The new ryzen9000 series desktop processors will ship in the 7th month, bringing the average IPC rise to 16% compared to its predecessor.

At first glance, Zen5 does not seem to be much different from Zen4. The computing chiplets (Ccd, core composite die) still have 8 cores, all sharing 32MB of L3 cache. The top-end Ryzen model still has 2 Ccd, so it won't exceed 16 cores and 32 threads on a standard gaming PC. Even the clock speed has not increased in this new generation.

Still, AMD believes that the new Ryzen9 7950X, a direct successor to the Ryzen9 9950X, will deliver more than 16% performance on average, while Blender and others are up to 23% faster.

In my Zen5 architecture dive, you can see more about the specific changes that provide this 16% IPC bump, but fairly small on paper AMD is adamant that the Zen5 is "not a trivial update" and in fact a "drastic update.""Of course, if an independent review came in, we would know for sure. AMD's figures on the Zen5 IPC uplift are for the Ryzen9 9950X flagship, but improvements should be seen throughout the series, especially with the new Ryzen7 9700X and Ryzen5 9600X.

What is not clear at this point is that the Ccd is either N5 or N4, as it is a process node manufactured at the TSMC foundry, but it is interesting to note that the default thermal design power (TDP) limit for 9000 low-spec chips is much lower than the Zen4 equivalent. It is. Whether that means overclocking will be easier or not is another matter, but it's good to see the power limits go down instead of going up because of the changes

Which certainly means they will be easier and cheaper to keep cool, and the 1W Ryzen9 I have on one of my test rigs is 7900. Also, the 170W Ryzen9 that I have now is almost slower than the 7900X, so the new 9700X and 9600X could be the best gaming CPUs for SFF builds, and a serious contender for everyone.

All of the new Ryzen9000 processors will use AM5 sockets, but AMD has also announced two new motherboard chipsets that complement the Zen5 architecture, which will be available in the next 2 months. The X870 and X870E both support USB4 and PCIe5.0 graphics cards and SSDs as standard and have higher EXPO DDR5 memory speeds. How fast, again, is not completely clear, but I suspect it will go from the current DDR5-5200 to DDR5-5600, perhaps 6000.

At the moment, it is not clear what difference there is between the 2 chipsets, but it is probably due to the additional ports and M.It's a number of 2 sockets and will be the E version with far more connection options than the standard X870.

If you wanted to see the 3D V-cache variant launch along with the main chip, I think there were no signs of them in the announcement, but that's the equivalent of the course at the launch of AMD chip. There was a big gap between the Zen4 announcement and the ryzen9 7950X3D launch, so it's probably the same here. The best part of the announcement for the Zen5 and Ryzen9000 series is that everything will start shipping on May 7, so wait a very long time to see how good the new Cpus are, and once we get them, we will of course do a thorough test and let you know how good the Zen5 really is.